#mageessay

[enneamage]

tell me more about how mcyt fans have mutated in the Twitter space

I'll reveal my outpost because I don't have an actual account anywhere to give away: I've been watching the Good Omens to Dr Who pipeline slowly flood with former MCYT/streamer fans. Something profoundly full-circle watching people become whovians on social media after ten years of stigma. There's gotta be more places like this, but this happens to be the one I have eyes on.

MCYT doesn't exclusively own 'callout culture' and it definitely isn't where it started, it's at least a decade old by now that I can confirm and probably way older, but it's always new to somebody and it looks like that's what's happening here. I'm seeing a lot of people forged in the fire of MCYT discourse bring some of that flavor into new spaces (sparing you a discourse recap) and the subtle shifts of values and priorities making a big difference.

This is making me think about what MCYT fan defector take-aways would even be, what lessons do people make choices based on when they decide to move on? I think a big one is showing up a lot right now: For better of for worse, never assume the best in people, because that will be exploited by those who can benifit from your passivity. I really don't think some people are ready for how 'never assume the best in people if they haven't proven anything' is a genuine, hard-learned moral stance that was installed in people for three solid years as the MCYT circle crumpled in on itself. Especially for the people on the other end of the spectrum who are more idealising, sentimental, forgiving, whatever.

There's also the passive creeping guilt by association, where if someone is off and you say nothing, you're assumed to be off too. This feels like a big one that was learned in the streamer-pits, never assume that someone is 'secretly' good when they keep company with people who are off. Also, don't try to cope by thinking that you've moved on to stanning someone better if the above situation applies to who you disowned / who you moved on to, that's just coping.

I'm watching the former MCYTs dig into a really strong harshness against the people who do have a more 'assume the best' mentality. They really give people the business for being too naive or having their priorities out of order (Parasocial and all it's heavyness still hangs over these people, you are lesser/maybe even a bit crazed to have faith in a celeb over your principles. Your attention is money and you are complicit.)

This is hitting a certain kind of fan sideways right now. The ones who are more 'faithful' (sentimental and idealising) approach and get defensive on the behalf of celebs are digging their heels in and responding in their own... special way. When you mix that with a certain kind of gen X sentimental streak and a self-pity reflex, it gets real cringe real fast.

It's discourse addiction versus the copium epidemic, it's nasty out there, I'm keeping in my hole.

[lemonriice]

ill reblog a bunch of shit from my likes to cover those posts tas mageessay na ako promise

[enneamage]

hey what’s your thoughts on the ‘we must protect and infantilize ___’ agenda?

I’m on the kpop side of twitter (the outskirts and checking idols update pages only tbh, but I’m a but in the MC sphere!), and the psych side of it all is facinating.

I feel like it’s a coping mechanism for control in one’s life, but also loving and feeding into the parasocial side/idea of someone and not the … reality of a person I guess?

Thought I’d ask because of the streamer/idol parasocial overlap!

Not all streamers obvi do this, or intentionally (or double sided-ly), ofc ofc (felt the need to throw that in ;-;)

👏 LETS GO, 

Like with a lot of topics under the Parasocial umbrella, it’s hard to be sure that the seed of the issue is a problem itself and not a reasonable instinct gone haywire. Pity / empathy / the urge to be gentle or considerate to the people we like is pretty healthy in small doses, and it would be weirder if we didn’t have it, so I try to start from there. 

Part of this is the fact that you can get high on love and investing in a celeb is a fabulously easy way to do so. Having idealized love for someone or something feels great, and celebrities have been outlets for this forever. It’s much more difficult and high stakes to put this kind of faith in someone you actually know, and I think some part of people knows that, which is why we try to get our ‘unrealistic’ faith out in the celebrity world just to have something to hold onto. I haven’t felt it in god-knows-how-long, but in a world where there’s not much else to hold onto I get the appeal. The blend of romantic and parental protectiveness that some fans bring to the table is a hormonal cocktail for maximum payoff as well. Then there’s the more Symbolic angle where people will see something in someone not just for the experience of the feelings, but because they see something they value in a person, whether they were looking for that trait before they found them or they were inspired by seeing a bit of it in them when they appeared. Celebs tend to have some kind of star power element that makes them worth thinking about, so again, it’s free real estate. Through defending the celeb, you get to defend someone or something that is important to you. 

Protecting and infantilizing don’t always have to go hand in hand, is the thing. I think that people can be protective of someone who fits any kind of descriptor as long as seeing Certain Content either bothers the audience member, or the audience member imagines it would bother the Celeb. A lot of Standom™️ on the more toxic end can be defined by their defensiveness of a given celeb, but that isn’t all infantilizing– sometimes it’s done to try and make someone come off as more grand or tough by acting as an army on their behalf. 

The infantilizing part is interesting. Interpretation is inevitable (Roxy paraphrase) so you can’t really have a celeb without people having some kind of read on them. You can’t be famous without people thinking about you, it’s just a question of how. Small bean / cinnamon roll / babygirlification is an ingredient that goes into this, how much the concept of vulnerability or innocence or moral purity is part of their perceived persona. You can even chunk it down further into how ‘likely’ it is that they are a certain way from their persona, versus gratifying it is to imagine them a certain way anyway.

I’m not an expert on the kpop angle at all compared to how complex it is over there, but from my very shallow observation it looks like some people kind of get assigned Baby by management because they know it’s a persona that works well with people. The Kpop industry seems to be good at being brutally honest about what people ‘parasocially’ want from idols and isn’t afraid to give it to them. I think your last line is drawing on that a bit, the idea that some of these personas are deliberately baited / played into in a sinister way instead of just being upheld by the fans. 

The real breaking point for the babying tends to come when the person who was being made baby does something very un-baby and people move to dismiss or defend or protect them (or the idea of them) from the situation. It pushes people on the outside to the limit when they see people acting to defend someone who seems to be clearly out of sync with the image people have of them in their heads, since the evidence for them not being that way is right there. Some people snap out of it and have to deal with the heartbreak of losing what they thought they had in that person, which is as real a pain as anything, but I know that people can get self-righteous and annoyed from the outside looking in. 

I think people react very badly to ‘misplaced’ pity online. Even in fictional contexts people tend to get uneasy seeing people get too Soft with any one given person, let alone people who have canonically done Evil. This has different and way more grounded stakes IRL where everyone involved is real, but just as a baseline I think online spaces can be particularly against anything that goes against the hard factkeeping of who did what. Explaining away or forgiving things can feel like a lapse in justice, the opposite of holding people accountable, because it takes entire events and voids their importance, or fails to give them importance to begin with. It’s hard enough to get any kind of accountability to take place online where laws barely apply, exploitation of audiences is the norm and the mental refresh rate of the average viewer (who brings in the ad revenue) is on the level of a goldfish. Nobody can take justice for granted online, and the immune system that’s grown to try and counteract that tends to be strict to make up for it. 

The topic of humanizing is hard. It’s more of a literary concept than something you can objectively point to. Is trying to extend empathy humanizing? Is playing down someone’s seemingly larger-than-life traits to bring them back down to earth humanizing?  Honestly I don't think people agree what being human / ‘regular’ off a pedestal looks like, and that sometimes people are just telling other people to have less intense and specific emotions about someone. Does falling in or out of love with someone humanize them more? What is essentially human is a massive question that we do not all agree on, so not everyone can be tweaked back to a baseline that doesn’t exist. 

(Tangent while I’m here, getting random lectures to not put CCs on pedestals when the standard that was failed is “do not commit crimes or exploit minors” has been getting to me. It kind of backhandedly implies that you need to be aware / okay with that being a possibility when getting into CCs because That’s How It Be Sometimes, and can come off as weirdly callous.) 

I feel like we’re talking about Boundary Culture in a sense, in the unfortunate way that it actually manifests versus the hard-to-disagree-with concept of boundaries as found in therapy speak. People with deeper investment do ironically have a certain civilizing effect that the people who aren’t as deep in the pocket tend to lack– boundary culture does not fly if you don’t think that the Celeb’s sense of what they want to allow is more important than what you may want to do. People who are less invested may not always be outright violating because they may just not care, but it doesn’t come from a deeply held moral place so much. 

I tend to take the stance that I don’t like what internalizing an absolute sense of duty to famous strangers does in the long run, both to individuals and the internet. It brings in a weird feudalism angle that feels too image-controlled for someone as paranoid as me. Plus, too much optimism freaks me out because I lost most of it like six online fallouts ago. 

Having written all this out, underneath it all it’s kinda sad. People get desperate for something Pure because of how bad it gets in the world, and then they can get preyed on for wanting to invest that hope somewhere, even if that place exists outside of normal life. When The Shit goes down, the value of the ‘betrayer’ drops through the floor, but the emotional desperation only gets tighter as another person fails to be decent, and the spiral continues. Touching grass doesn’t always fix despair like that if the grass is also fucked up. 

In general I Am Skeptical when it comes to hanging hopes and affections on personas that seem too good to be true, but I also like to de-escalate things a bit because we’re in a massive moral panic right now with parasocial relationships, and we’re much better learning to deal with them than pretending it’s possible to stop having them. 

[enneamage]

There’s been some chatter about fanfic and after a quick look around some tags that I don’t visit a lot, I’m back to thinking about the consequences of repression and fandom sexuality again. Below the cut I’m going to talk about the way that parts of the fandom tend to hide themselves from their own motivations and the ways that sexuality tends to bubble up when people loose their self-awareness to the obsession with being “good.”

I think it’s important to define my terms up front, so I’ll say that ‘kink’ does not have to be literally explicitly sexual to be kink, I’ll be using it from here on as an umbrella term for highly intimate power dynamics and sensuality related to those dynamics. It’s like when a dominatrix walks someone like a dog, it’s not sex but something is clearly going on that’s creating a mood, and the people involved (and watching) are getting something out of it.

I’ll also throw out a 'not all fic that involves these tropes is this way' disclaimer as well, since being black-and-white about what is and isn’t allowed is what got us here to begin with. Some of this stuff comes down to things being greater than the sum of their parts and coming to intuition-based conclusions, which for a while I was putting on the back shelf because of how hard stuff like this is to talk about, but in light of some new developments I think it’s worth trying to explain my thinking.  

I think that there are fic tropes around SBI that have gone on for a while now that are over the line into kink territory. Back when Tommy was younger and the family dynamic was more of a meme playing out in real time, having him be the young adoptee made sense for plot reasons. He was projected on because he was the ‘protagonist’ as well as the same age as the audience, so he was the most convenient seat to sit in as a viewer/reader. What I wasn’t prepared for or expecting is the places where things haven’t changed over the years, or the way that time has flowed backwards for some people into even more extreme ‘caregiver’ situations. This has made me re-think some things that I’ve seen over time as being less coincidental than I thought, and becoming a bit concerned about the notorious ‘platonic’ blind spot in the fandom.

Honestly, I’ve been under the impression that people have been sublimating their wants for a while now when it came to SBI. I know that people argue all the time about ‘platonic’ physical affection but in the brief trips I’ve made into the ao3 tag there’s a suspiciously strong drive to get them to either coo over each other, be possessive of each other, sleep in the same bed or just touch each other a lot. I’ve seen short fics about animal hybrids being opportunities to engage in sensuality that people don’t have to feel guilty about writing because there’s no human equivalent so you can just. Rub someone. For a really long time. A lot of the above comes off as pre-sexual behavior for people who know what to look for, even though you could lawyer it into being fine from a technical perspective.

Over time there’s been a building, fairly motivated lack of self-awareness around what is and isn’t above board. I think this is a cycle that comes up because people want to make or see something, but don’t want to feel guilty or “bad’ or stop making it, so they defend it morally to avoid being attacked morally. “I don’t think they would do that, this is kind of incesty” becomes “Let men/families be Soft, you’re the weirdo for thinking this is weird.” People don’t have a developed sense of what feelings are on the sexuality spectrum and are discouraged from figuring them out because it would make them boundary-breaking sexualisers if it turned out that that’s what their motive was. Nobody wants to be labeled an evil pervert so people shut down and withdraw into whatever team will back them up while still getting what they want.

This community actually has a perfect example of what this lack of self-awareness eventually creates: Fellas I’m doing it, I’m talking about ‘mcyt tickle.’

The mcyt tickle community is a group that swears up and down that they are not sexual and they don’t want anything to do with shippers and they’re purely, exclusively 'platonic.' This community is focused on tickle dynamics, tickle content and tickle fic, and almost everyone in the community claims to be against shipping and very against ‘sexualization.’ People from minors to legal adults are all gathered in this space and sharing content that they are all really, really into. This space is a perfect mini-example of what scares me the most when a community is afraid to self-reflect, because I’ve been keeping loose tabs on them for a while with a question in mind:

How the hell did they get their hands on the language and habits of the tickle fetish community? And how did it ever get this big?

This group uses the terms Lee, Ler and switch, all of which are terms for what ‘role’ a person plays in the fic. These are lifted from the fetish scene, whether they know it or not. Some of them even avoid the word tickle, which is another tell because people who have fetishes will sometimes avoid even using the word for it since it’s so intense for them. Sometimes fetishes are so strong and innate that they completely replace the sex drive with the desire for the thing or scenario, so I would even call into question when people insist that they’re ‘not into anything except tickling,’ because that may well be the issue.

Somewhere along the way at least someone lied by omission, either to themselves or to somebody else, and it spread to people who range from minors to adults, all of whom swear that they stand completely against ‘sexualization’ and would never do such a thing. I do genuinely believe that at least some people in that community aren’t aware that they’re producing things in the style of fetish content, or that fetish doesn’t have to have anything to do with ‘normal’ sexual activity because that’s what makes it kink/a fetish—it’s a non-standard expression of sensuality that people have a fixation on. Kink is more than literal sex, and that’s where things get messy.

Back to “Family Dynamics,” you can imagine where I’m going with this. I think that the rein of the SBI family dynamic has accidentally installed a subsection of the fandom with a fixation on Tommy being the child character and Wilbur/Phil/Techno being caregiver characters in a way that if left unchecked starts to look like “Caregiver” / “Little” dynamics, but made even more literal by aging him down to whatever they see fit. Again, this isn’t everyone, but it’s enough people to notice by now, and you can imagine where the discomfort comes from when it’s done on main. The petplay community also get a shoutout if we’re covering all the bases, since pet shifter / “X animal hybrid" Tommy is also a high traffic concept, and he gets the caregiver/possessiveness treatment in that context as well.

I have been online for years, I know kink dialogue when I see it. Corny Dom voice can be heard from miles away. Mcyt tickle has it with fetish sprinkles, corny Dadbur can have it, dark SBI can tend toward it in romance novel level possessiveness, the menacingly or playfully possessive petname language is clear as day when it shows up. It’s designed to put emphasis on the possessive power gap and make the small one feel smaller and the big one feel bigger, that’s the payoff, that’s the intimacy that puts it over the line.

Caregiver little/pet dynamics are the millennial and zoomer kink relationship styles. I know you’ve seen those corny discord kitten memes, this is literally it. This is the call of the power dynamic, this is the compulsion, the fixation on ‘softness’ and intimacy and the contrasting power dynamic of being really really tiny and having intense dominant caregiver attention solely on them and their vulnerable littleness. It’s a dynamic based on something real (child or pet,) but it’s a caricature, and it’s a means to an end to create a power dynamic/effect to satisfy a need. It might not need to be literally sexual, but that fixation is coming from somewhere and feeding something.

I want to be clear that I’m not angry about this as much as I am aware of how awkward this position is for people. It’s obvious that these spaces have guilted people out of very normal feelings like age-typical crushes and attraction to people who it would be perfectly normal to find attractive. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of this content is to cope with the fact that people have been guilted into repressing more ‘normal’ sexual feelings into “enthusiasm about family dynamics.” I also know that not everyone is hiding something and some people really are here for gen fic, but it’s becoming clearer and clearer that not everyone has the tools to be honest with themselves or others.

There’s a massive consent issue that comes into play when people don’t know that what they’re looking at or participating in has crossed over into kink. Pushing the idea that some of this stuff is not only a morally safe thing but the only morally safe thing is coercive in ways that makes me nervous. I’ve seen people condemn shipping in the name of boundaries and then turn around to write blatant kink, the cognitive dissonance is huge, and I’m worried for the younger people who could be guilted into or fall for it because they also have a very literal understanding of sexuality.

I don’t think that these people deserve to get the firing squad for having wandered in this direction, especially if they didn’t really understand what they were doing, but I think it’s really important that people are allowed to talk about this stuff to get that self-awareness, otherwise we get another hiding-in-plain-sight fetish community situation. The issue is, people are afraid of questioning their own motivations because of how harsh the fandom can be, so they get in the habit of hiding from each other and themselves and keeping certain trends in motion. Still, I think it’s worth pointing out that this community is prone to self-deception and is very defensive in certain areas because of how much fear and shame exists around the topic of sexualization.

[enneamage]

Been rolling this idea around a bit lately. I think that there are some people who expect that if they 'get rid of'/get revenge on the right person, they’ll somehow create a sense of satisfaction that could offset the massive emotional toll that lockdown had on them. Something under the sunk cost fallacy, that if they ride things out for long enough the universe will have to reward them with whatever it is they’re waiting for.

Lockdown and this corner of mcyt fandom are incredibly linked, most of it came about from people having massive amounts of time, not much good in the world to invest in and no way to conduct an IRL social life. (Not a 'touch grass' snipe, just the genuine state of affairs, nobody had a choice here.) The entire planet became noisy roommates on twitter dot com, and the challenge of any huge group living together constantly is primarily making sure they don’t seriously hurt each other, because they often do. Everyone became hostage to everyone else, drinking from the fire hose of the fandom activity of thousands of people at a time. Add being trapped in a small space for months at a time and the world becomes a screen, a website, a fandom, and the people in it become larger than life.

Real hurt was happening all the time, and people took it out on each other every day. It had a lot of layers: the constant abstract fear of death and distrust of the entire world, the double-sided nature of attachment making people protective of some ccs while going after others, people seeing themselves in others and taking the problems that someone was put through personally, the ugly parts of society naturally coming out because no fandom is a vacuum. Everyone was ‘going through some stuff at home’ every day and channelling it into fandom discourse because there wasn’t much else people had. Subgroups started to hold grudges against ccs and each other, and the pressure built from there.

Honestly, I don’t think that cathartic ‘moment’ could ever fully exist, especially compared to the grief of the lockdowns. Scapegoats, even if they did wrong, often take more blame and symbolic value than naturally belongs to them, and getting rid of them solves less than people think it does even when it’s necessary. If the nail that stands out gets hammered down, there will always be another nail, and if the only way people have to cope with it is complete elimination this cycle will never really end. It’s important to be able to recognize that perfect closure isn’t going to happen, and waiting for it genuinely drives people crazy. People have to give themselves permission to move on instead of waiting for the internet to hand it to them, even if it's hard.

[enneamage]

I was reading your post about RPF and was hoping that you could explain to me why so many people like to write it. I would go so far as to say I am repelled by it and don't understand the appeal whatsoever. tbh I don't even like fan fiction for what I think is the same reason: it isn't canon. It seems presumptive of any individual that has nothing to do with a creative project to contribute to it as if it is part of the original. It is even worse if we are talking about something that is irl. Why is it not enough to create a fictional work with all of the same traits that the writer believes the fiction or irl subjects have, and then just change the names? If the content is good enough, it doesn't have to be propped up on irl people in order to get readers.

Oh nelly here we go.

Whenever people ask about RPF fic I’m used to trying to use what footholds they do have in fan culture to direct them to why people write these kinds of taboo extremes, but you seem to be pretty squarely affirmational in a sea of transformational people, so this is going to start right from zero.  

I wouldn’t choose an RPF fandom to be babies first fandom justifying experience because of how deep in the pocket it is compared to some other transformational fandoms, so starting there is hard. If you’ve never had the experience of being exposed to something and wanting more of something, or different from something, or had your imagination wander off with what you’ve just seen, a lot of what transformational fandom does in general will seem baffling, let alone rpf spaces.

Basic Transformational Fandom

Transformational fandoms tend to kick off in media that provides a fun sandbox or (even when it’s good) leaves a little bit more to be desired. From there, the people left wanting start to group up and create markets for the creation of fanwork, and eventually someone puts hand to keyboard to make something. People sometimes think that transformational fandom is recent but the truth is that Fanficiton Fanzines stretch back well beyond the creation of the internet, people have been craving transformational content and art for a long time, and are very stubborn when it comes to finding each other to do it.  

Speaking from personal experience, even though fandoms often reliably form around media, I haven’t participated in the fandom for every piece of media I’ve consumed, so I know what it’s like to be interested and disinterested in the fandoms around what I watch/read/ect. There’s been times where I was very into a fandom in a traditional “I want as much of this as possible and also X and Y to smooch” way, times when I was kind of put off by what a given fandom was doing so I took the pass, and times when I was more interested in what the fandom was putting out than the actual content itself. It can take some shopping around to find a spot where what a market has lines up with what appeals to you.

So there’s… a bit of a leap between the usual premise of transformational fandom and rpf spaces. My understanding of the people who pipeline from regular fiction to RPF is they develop the instincts in one context and then they just retain and use that capacity when they switch to another. That sounds a bit slippery-slope but I mean that they just don’t have to start from scratch if they came through more traditional and less taboo fandoms. People still tend to draw the line because RPF is still mostly taboo (the fact that this fandom has such a large, open presence of it is wild to me, I’m really not used to it but such is the fine line of Minecraft roleplay) but some people find it easier to cross because of their background.

The Fantasy Market

There’s something of a midway between fic and conversation that doesn’t get covered as much even though it feels like the missing link between regular idle fantasising and RPF. People tend to want peer-to-peer contact with other people who share the same interests as them, and exchanging ideas or scenarios surrounding those interests is a go-to for that.

The line between trying to find the truth vs feeling out an appealing scenario brings be back around again to my imago post, so if people wanted to collect their “parasocial relationships are the devil” ticket here’s an easy one. You may have seen these kinds of posts around—“[name] would like a teddy bear. He would pretend he didn’t at first but eventually he would become the type of guy to get all the way out of bed if it fell on the floor in the middle of the night to go get it.” It’s not fic, but it’s a longform hypothetical that someone would post to their peers, maybe to get a full on conversation going about how much milage [name] would get out of a stuffed animal. From there they get to feel closer to their fellow fans, and also feel like they understand a bit more about the person they’re all interested in, since pattern finding is a big part of human cognition in general and it's fun to do it together.

On the hormonal end of the spectrum, thirstposting is a deceptively complicated art, somewhere between personal venting and posting for the people around them to resonate with. I know people mostly like to act like thirst tweets are always embarrassing and unwelcome, but honestly having a brother in arms in Times Of Great Thirst usually bonds a community pretty tightly.  

Self-inserts and X readers have never been my thing, but they’re an important link in the evolutionary chain of how we get from one person daydreaming to a whole community of readers and writers. There’s a market for good ideas about a certain person or situation even if they aren’t fleshed out, but a few steps in you start looking at content that looks more like fiction. A good offshoot of this step that people don’t often talk about or understand in these terms were the original POV tiktoks and concept/Imagine blogs. The people love a good scenario, and environments where some of the best imaginations are grinding out content to fuel your daydream can be great for that.  

I think that the people who didn’t enter through ‘regular’ transformational fandom probably found their way through this door instead. Fantasy tweet becomes thirst tweet becomes thread fic becomes wattpad, graduates to ao3 maybe, whoops we’re reading novels now.

The Reader / Writer Market

I use the word ‘market’ a little differently than some others might when talking about this stuff. A while ago I started poking around Economic Anthropology in a very amateurish way, because that was the first place I came across an idea that managed to line up with the majority of my fandom experience, the idea that ‘economics’ are the dynamics of human exchange based on wants and needs, not just the study of money and assets. Money only covers a fraction of the number of exchanges that happen in life, non-monetary economy is what I find really interesting, and what I relate to parts of fandom as. Think of the strangely elaborate systems that seem to reliably pop up when people want something, I have seen amazingly complex fandom coordination from young teenagers as long as the desire and the drives were there. Economics gets a lot more saucy once you start to relate to it as a study of human desire and how those desires get met.

The people want what the people want, and in fandom they often want more of the thing they’ve invested in. It’s often not enough, or even very appealing at all, to write something “original” or removed from the scene when the party is in the scene itself. Some people probably give it a go, but truth be told they often don’t get seen as often as work with the built-in audience that a fandom has/is. The goal probably isn’t even to be seen by a lot of people, but to show stuff to the people who would be most interested in that stuff, even if there’s only five people who are invested. People get content, author gets validation and engagement, it’s a little loop that’s a lot harder to get to in the cold world of original publishing. Most people don’t really want to become career writers anyway, they want to see their favorite boys smooch in the form of the kind of stories they read, which are likely already fic.

Footnote about old lit on transformational vs affirmative: A lot of the old conversation is gendered in ways that I understand, because they absolutely mattered / do matter, but modern fandoms like the MLP fandom are shaking up that binary. Men do take part in transformational fandom, just not as often as women on the whole.

[enneamage]

Greetings everyone, today I’m going to talk about Fawn™️ and Fawning.

Fawn is the people-pleasing instinct that comes from a similar place that Fight Flight and Freeze do. Talking about fawn is a bit complicated because unlike explaining stuff with “you see a bear wyd” panic responses, fawning happens 90% between people and the way it can present is as complicated as interpersonal relationships are.

A lot of the conversation around Fawn is in complex ptsd circles because of how prevalent it can become after being exposed to dangerous power dynamics where someone can’t afford to upset someone else, but the ‘ability’ to fawn is a potential in most people even if they don’t have trauma. Going back to the bear for a minute, giving the bear all your food so you stay on its good side and doesn’t attack you would be an example. Outside of the bear example you could start people-pleasing at the threat of the loss or disapproval of someone (both very subjective- this is the more textured human part) by offering things, faking agreement, minimising your own needs or bargaining/begging.

Not all people-pleasing is fawning in the same way that not all arguments or fear are fight/flight responses, so it takes some eyeballing to get a sense of when someone is fawning. Keep an eye out for situations where someone is in a (subjectively) high-adrenaline situation or under stress. On the flip side, fawning can kind of get watered down into patterns everyday life in the same way that fight and flight can in terms of traits/patterns- someone who ‘prefers’ to smooth things over (at all costs) vs someone who ‘prefers’ to get angry vs someone who ‘prefers’ to just leave.

[enneamage]

Not directly to Generation Loss, but I've been given a lot of thoughts to the younger generation of minecraft streamers and their attempts to do big projects to "break out of" the minecraft mold: obviously, with Ranboo, we have Generation Loss, which seemed to go over well with his fanbase (enough so that he's stated he's thinking of quitting MCC, which is really the only tie he's had to the game for about a year atp), with Tommy, we have his New York vlog series and now his liveshows, and with Tubbo, while still Minecraft-adjacent, we have Tubnet. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about what would make a cc successful at shifting their core audience into a brand new project that isn't necessarily the type of content that they got famous for. Do the audiences of all three ccs differ enough that they would need different strategies to shift their content? My running theory is that Generation Loss was mostly successful among his fanbase because it played on the tropes that were apparent in his minecraft lore from the beginning: mind control, a protagonist forced to do awful things against his will, a base npc type character that occasionally has overwrought freakouts over their lack of control, etc. It was just in a medium outside of Minecraft.

Meanwhile, Tommy is finding himself in a rut because he can't fully apply his storytelling skills to a non-Minecraft setting (in part because he's focusing more on comedy, and while his fans like his sense of humor, I think, in his lore, they also liked the Marvel-esque main character energy, which doesn't translate when it's just the cc having a huge ego, and the angst) and his vlogs, when they aren't completely on the backburner, seem too formulaic to have their early charm. As for Tubbo, while obviously a minecraft server is, well, minecraft, there wasn't enough "entertainment"/lore/a connection to the streamer to encourage his core audience to play Tubnet, at least not in the form it was released as. In short, I feel traditional mcyt-ers are looking for narratives or entertainment value from these bunch of ccs. Although maybe Lovejoy's success goes against this theory. It just seems like all the younger minecraft streamers have attempted to release a large project within the last year or so, and while that might not be indicative of them trying to leave the fandom, I sense a restlessness in all of them and a wish to move on.

(Okay so this is going under a readmore because it is a long’un)

As of 2023 in a post-lockdown and post-DSMP world I got the sense that a lot of people were restless regarding what to do and where to go next, CC and audience alike. I think that because the DSMP was such a specific time and place in people’s lives it’s inevitable that the majority of people (because those numbers were huge) will have moved on to watching/wanting other things, so retention through sameness may not work, but you’re onto something with the feeling like there’s no in-character story to follow anymore. The thing I poke at from time to time is that there’s no out-of-character plot to follow anymore either, most of the irl narratives have been resolved or brought off-camera so even the RPF people have to scavenge for food.

Lovejoy has a rising star narrative that people can invest in if they want; with them breaking free of associations with mcyt to be treated like serious musicians, and I think it also serves a purpose ofpeople trying to wash off post-mcyt shame in themselves. (“this is Wilbur Soot and this is WILL GOLD” they tweet, as though that is not a literal man onstage performing, but they’ve already decided what they want to believe in.) I’m sensing some misguided stabs to try and not be treated like the bottom of the food chain in the vocal fanbase by desperately trying to push away from the MCYT association, which is probably where those peoples heads are at all around. Most lovenjoyers are fine with it and just enjoy the music because it’s obviously how they got there, but there’s clearly a friction going on.

Ranboo has a kind of watered-down version of that following them. I remember when I first saw someone say very defensively that Ranboo wasn’t an MCYT, they were a variety streamer. Ranboo has been drifting away from MC for a long time, both moving into the variety realm and daydreaming about Genloss. When people win the internet lottery young it makes sense to want to put the money towards a project that they would only be stuck imagining otherwise, and Genloss very much feels like that kind of dream. I would say that Ranboo has successfully pivoted to variety and even completed their first big project, but they’ll need to re-capture that audience every time they make a Generation from now on, which could be hard to do with breaks in between.

Tubbo has also moved into variety streaming, which is kind of a necessity for the hours he keeps. He also has an ongoing love for big projects like Recipe for Disaster. Tubbo’s longterm investment and labor of love was Tubnet, which would have established him as the owner of a server like the one that he used to play on when he was younger. I don’t know what Tubbo’s relationship to storytelling is, I’ve heard he does it on a small scale but he also has a unique love of engineering, which Tubnet was more about. As far as I know there were a lot of things that eventually led to Tubnet’s low player turnout, but one of them had to have been low demand; I remember people saying that there was no use re-inventing Hypixel when Hypixel already had all the Hypixel players. Regardless of if this was fair or not, Tubnet didn’t wind up developing a large player base from his fame, which unfortunately shows that not all attention rolls over equally.

Tommy has been pouring his storytelling skills into writing his live show, which he’s advertising as the best thing he’s ever written as well as his biggest self-disclosure. It’s autobiographical theatre, but also a puppet musical-- we will see what the audience reviews think. Tommy’s been experimenting the most to see that he wants to do next, I know he’s stated that 2022 was a big ‘try’ year for him and he’s also talked about focusing on the quality of viewers over the quantity because focusing on hard statistics made him miserable. I know Tommy doesn’t want to move away from Minecraft, he’s actually very tightly holding on and trying to find ways to love it again, as well as make it worthwhile for audiences. Some of the things Tommy has been saying lately make it sound like he wants to turn back time a bit, recapture what streaming and video gamed used to feel like for him when he was younger, so we’ll see what resonates with the others. There’s a lot of really dense nostalgia around Minecraft (look at these comment sections they’re haunting) and judging from his current taste in video essays he’s got a moderate case of it.

I think the pattern here is marrying the thing that you want to with what audiences want, which is infinitely harder to do than it is to say. Human motivation is fluid and weird, and not many people are going to be able to say what it is they’ll want or like until something or someone is put in front of them. What people want also changes over time, so it can be a bit like chasing the wind or catching an updraft to get in the air when it comes to getting an audience. There’s a formula for the YouTube algorithm, but there’s not a clear map for the less cheap or predictable parts of the psyche. 

Even when you’ve got an audience, when it’s time to pivot over to something completely new it’s kind of time to be a whole new person to them; your function and role in someone’s life is changing. It’s rolling the dice and seeing if you can do and be something that resonates in a new form. People fall out of love with other people all the time, and I think that CCs get the same effect as the seasons change-- sometimes people change and cause a split, sometimes people stay the same and get stale over time. For the same reason that people can be ride or die because a CC is themselves, when someone falls out of love with a cc there’s not much that can make them stay if the rest of the content doesn’t deliver. I don’t see people talk about it at length, but I have seen this image make the rounds so it’s a shared thing.  

Shortest answer is I think there’s no formula that can be divined outside of a retroactive twelve hour video essay breakdown of each individual’s creators strengths and weaknesses, and a matching breakdown of where the audience’s head was at. It’s much easier to look back on something specific and say ‘this is why this worked / didn’t work’ than grind out guidelines beyond ‘avoid making the audience feel completely alienated or betrayed.’ It can really come down to the audience, who can be attracted and put off by people for reasons that seem borderline intangible, like ‘authenticity.’

The good news is audiences need change and newness even if the content they like has a pattern, otherwise they would keep watching the same video. Even channels that make ‘more of the same’ put out a continuation of what they did last time, moving things along or adding to the collection somehow. Whether it’s in-character or out of character or a kind of abstract “I show up to this channel and things I like are on it,” I think people like to be able to make sense of what they’re clicking on so that they keep doing it. As long as the core remains intact, the people who are sufficiently invested in the creator tend to stick around unless life gets in the way.

As for the restlessness, I think that being on the frontier is kind of addictive. Not long ago someone pointed out to me that I had started wondering what the next big thing would be on behalf of the CCs because it’s an interesting question, especially coming off the back of the DSMP blowing up. I think that online can be a very punishing place if you don’t keep up with trends and frontiers since things change so fast, it’s rewarding if you get in early but you’re in danger if you’re left behind. This is actually as true for regular internet users as it is for CCs, think of the strangely potent social shame of using an out of date meme or not being up on the state of The Discourse, you’ll genuinely get punished if you’re too far out of sync with things. We’re in a year that is both hung over on lockdown and desperately trying to get moving again, right in the moment before the answer to what happens next is ‘obvious.’  

[enneamage]

my dream is to become a content creator, could I have the mage analysis/speech you were mentally drafting up for that other anon, pretty please? curious what you think about it

I might have overestimated how long I would need to go on for, but The Urgency was real. 

If this were more one-on-one, my impulse would be to walk people through their motivations for wanting to be a CC and being sure that those wants wouldn't get met easier somewhere else. It's very possible to truly want to Post, and I'm not trying to be the person who scares people off from their dreams, but if the motivation leans into a general "I want to feel like I make a difference in people's lives", that might be better served by another line of work. I'm saying this part in particular because I've heard people who grew up watching or looking up to CCs can have an outstanding sense of the positive impact that CCs can have on people, and can focus on that as a source of connection and meaning-making over other things. Being a CC can be very lonely, unstable and high-risk, so my impulse is to make sure people are sure what they're signing off on beforehand. 

I guess I think it's important to understand early on that being a CC is the gig economy wearing a wig. A lot of what drives people crazy is how conditional it turns out to be, the lack of stability seems to slowly wear on people's minds and ethics. Maybe it's not that much of a secret, but sometimes the survivor bias around the scene makes it look like it's something that people 'outgrow' as they get bigger, but that isn't fully the case. 

I guess this is the same speech I would give to anyone who wanted to go into 'creative performing' on some level, since "I want to be an actor/singer/writer" became "I want to be a CC" in early life stat gathering. It makes sense-- normal life can feel like there's no room to 'play' or be creative as an adult, so sometimes people come to think of doing something creative as a job as a way to preserve that in their lives. It can look like CCs have maximised freedom from the outside, but they're probably most vulnerable to the wants/needs of the market, and the 'doing your own hours' thing can easily become working all the time with no clear borders. It can be easy for your life and crativity to be co-opted by something you don't have as much control over as you would like. This is the point that I would want to make the clearest, since It's a tragic mistake to make a bid for freedom on one hand and then wind up stuck more consumed by the job than an office 9-to-5. It's a big bait and switch that people sign up for before they can see the other shoe drop, most people are stuck chasing results over fully being able to forge their own path.  

Being a CC also puts people in front of the court of public opinion in a way I'm sure you've seen if you're on this part of tumblr. People can be unfair, obscure in their reasoning, and hard to predict. Sometimes you'll even have to worry that your peers will go after you, which is a whole other thing. I wont go into this part as much since you probably already know, but this is also a big factor that I would want to warn people about. 

I don't know anything about your background, but my hobby is worrying about everybody, so don't take my fretting personally. Like being an actor, someone's gotta do it, and it's never impossible. It's probably enjoyable for the people who are deeply passionate and have a will to develop a talent for it. I just want to provide an alternate speech to the 'but what if it doesn't work out' lecture, since there are plenty of drawbacks that come from things working out 'perfectly' for an imperfect job too. 

[enneamage]

hi i dont know how to start this so im just going to get right into it

i never understood why twitter got so mad at this clip ever since i saw it live i actually thought i was more good than bad? that might sound crazy but the fact as a 16 year old cis guy got called a lesbian and didnt go "ew im not a LESBIAN!??!" and actually thought about it for a second.

i think thats perfectly normal at that age to wonder that to wonder about your sexual and gender identity. hell i did and i think if i never did that as a teen i would have never accepted the idea of me being a trans guy.

now this brings me to the point of this essay. i think if twitter didnt have a shit party over that clip he would be more comfortable expressing himself femininity and accepting his bisexuality.

sure he doesnt have a problem flirting with guys as we've seen but they've always been less "masc" than his whole "big man" persona i think he finds it easier to flirt with guys (with the exception of ranboo of course) if he views them as more fem or even as a women perhaps

im not one to truthing him being trans or clem being real but im not against it. this also isnt me truthing him as being trans. i think cis people expressing femininity and masculinity is so important male or female (femininity and masculinity are ALWAYS put as things that go inherently together, but for some reason theyre never put as things that compliment eachother but thats a whole different topic)

but what do i really know? i dont have an audience of 12 million on youtube and 7 miliion on twitch i cant imagine that many eyes on you just waiting to judge you on your every move

Anon I admire the drive but I’m afraid you’ve sent this to the person who authored the “Tommy being Bi won’t fix him” post, so I must stick to my convictions on this one.

(As an aside, for those who don’t know, meet Clementine!)

I was not directly around for The Lesbian Moment, but I think I heard the gunshots down the street. I think it’s hugely under-emphasised how everyone was on the back of a world-changing mass death event spread out over the course of at least two years around that time, and the way that it (reasonably, all things considered) affected the way people handled stress. People were very sensitised to a lot of things, and it doesn’t surprise me that this would be a case where zooming out from what the problem was ‘supposed to be about’ would reveal a massive soup of situational stressors looking for a fracturing point to express themselves.

As thousands of people were all suddenly shoved online to share the same spaces, the social processes involved with creating norms and group standards had tons of gas thrown on them. It was going to be messy no matter what, people were electing scapegoats left and right to set social standards about what was and wasn’t acceptable. This is grim but important context (Tw), lockdown was horrific for rates of at-home physical and sexual abuse. Being a woman online in general is a state of psychological warfare against an objectifying culture. I remember talk about how his audience was divided even then, a group of lesbians were like “hell yeah we can let Tommy join /nsrs” and then another group were not even remotely okay with that even as a joke.

People were sensitised to feeling invaded in a time where lockdown had personal agency down to record lows, especially for teenagers and children. In a world where you have next to no agency or personal control over your circumstances, having a say in dominant moral narratives and the accepted behavior of people skyrockets in value, because you’re constantly in other people’s power. People were profoundly invested in the few square inches of control that they could/did have, so they were deeply reactive with it. A lot of pandemic reactivity was the behavior of people who felt over-activated and cornered, so while it’s possible to critique the outrage and take it apart on the terms that it presented itself on, it’s important to understand it as part of a whole as well.

👏 ON TO THE GAY SHIT

I feel like what goes into Tommy flirting with each of the men he’s flirted with in the past has been a little bit different. Tubbo seemed like possessive best friend claiming mushed into a straight lens with a side of teasing (I like girls, I like Tubbo, Tubbo is girl.) Ranboo was a fascinating intersection of girlfriend sublimation and flirtation to raise his self-esteem, also a bit of an apology for the not-so-passive-aggression from when it looked like Ranboo had “stolen” Tubbo. I wasn’t around for TimeDeo, but fuck it, that counts too. I don’t think that the majority of his homosocial flirting was to make himself seem more masc, especially with Ranboo. (I’ll spare you examples but that particular stretch has some moments.)

Tommy had a ‘playing toughguy’ problem when he was younger, and it contributed to some of his worst habits in terms of what came out of his mouth. I would have attributed a lot of this to his environment, the influences that he related to both positively (edgy youtubers) and negatively (macho schoolmates.) He was very teenage boy, but even then he had an off-beat streak that I impressionistically related to as more femme, even when he was being abrasive. Ever since being forcibly civilised through Wilbur and the forces of the internet he’s had much less of that, but his femme streak has stayed in some form or another, just evolving to fit what’s needed of him at a given time.

The rate at which Tommy being a cishet man comes up as a genuine issue that people feel compelled to try and see resolved is interesting, even as someone who occasionally feels it myself. Like there’s got to be something to unpack in that dynamic, that whatever behavioral issue he’s experiencing at a given time feels tied to his identity as a cishet male and something that can be revised if he had the right personal revelations. The issue is, I just don’t think it’s true, or at least wouldn’t make the difference that some people would want it to make. Some of his problems could even be tied up in his Englishness, and that’s straight up incurable. It’s hard for me to imagine that having a sexuality related revelation would make that big of a difference in the grand scheme of… him as a person. He’s got a lot of moving parts.

I do feel some frustration on behalf Tommy in terms of being a target of essentialist thought. He’s not allowed to be as camp as he probably wants to be because it comes off as offensive to gay culture, and he’s not allowed to be overtly femme because people are strict about policing gender expression right now if a given person doesn’t take on a certain label that corresponds with it. He’s assumed to have the worst intentions if he isn’t directly part of a certain group, and he really is clumsy with things that he doesn’t understand so he can be better off sometimes keeping his hands inside his box, but it’s still kind of sad to see the roundabout way that these binaries re-enforce themselves with someone like him. At the same time, try not to mourn over ‘what could have been’, because it’s still a form of essentialism to think that having traits more commonly associated with non-cishet identity would solve his problem-of-the-week, and there’s no guarantee that’s the case.

[enneamage]

The original incel essay post got way out of hand, so this is a shortened version, which is funny because it’s still pretty long. For now I’m rounding it down to the concern I have for The Nerd Youth and the ‘no bitches’ meme circulating among them. I want to say it’s not unusual for a generation settling an internet frontier (new scene, new website, new movement) to do something oddly regressive, because they're New Humans and don't know how things are connected yet. It’s not unusual for them to pick up the nearest seemingly-safe sticks they can find and jab each other with them to get some conversation / social hierarchy going, even if those sticks are really loaded with history and negative consequences.

Internalising incelisms

‘if you haven’t had X sexual/romantic experience by Y date you’re a ruined person’ is a pillar of incel thinking, so making people for being virgins or single is keeping that attitude alive, even if the person throwing the insult isn’t technically an “incel” themselves. Incels are partly a symptom of a much bigger problem culture has with treating the number and availability of sexual partners in your life as a persons overall value, because the manosphere didn’t just make that concept up themselves.

Underneath the rise in ‘bitches’ memes going around it’s clear that this is just people taking shots at an easy target because society puts relationships high on the social success escalator; if someone is dating you, you’re apparently doing something right, and slightly less suffocated by the loneliness problem in the west. In the context of hookups, you’re appealing and socially acceptable to attractive strangers, getting physical fulfillment without putting down vulnerable attachments. Overall, you’re capable of fulfilling someone else and someone else finds you worthy of fulfilling, a successful social exchange. On the flip side, you’re apparently a loser If you don’t have that. It’s got its barbs because it’s based on a simplistic understanding of sex & relationships, even from the people using it, and it really takes root where people tend to be isolated online.

The Valley Of The Bitchless

Why are people just tossing the phrase ‘getting bitches’ out there like it’s nothing again? I know it’s ironic but is it. Is it really. Because it’s looking like people kinda mean it even if its hyperbolic.

More than half the value of this meme comes from the fact that ‘getting bitches’ is meant to be easy for the Cool People but hard for either you or the person you’re insulting. Being alone was turned into a stick to poke people with because it was easy to weaponize people's insecurity about being awkward and unlovable, especially online. People then internalize this insecurity and then throw it back at other people, causing a loop. People attack each other for not conforming to a vision of what a "desirable person" is, and in some circles that vision comes dangerously close to the incel invention of 'Chad and Stacey'.

'Chad and Stacey' are the perfectly beautiful, socially gifted, perfectly 'normal' mythological creatures of incel thought. The idea of "Chad" came from the mind of people who defined themselves by their social exclusion. They obsessively poured over what they felt they didn't have and built an image of 'the perfect person' based on media and everything they felt they lacked. In the online circles I've been watching, there's a building pyramid of value based on how far removed people are from the internet and its cultures (intense niche interests, unusual hobbies, social anxiety, looks), and it's a validation of the existence of Chads & Staceys by everything but name and a few cosmetic changes. It's really not that different when a Twitter user with a picrew icon does it.

“Uncool” people fuck plenty, you’re fine

Here's the secret-- our sex neurotic culture actually isn’t talking about sex for sex's sake, and we haven't been for a long time. We're talking about soothing an anxiety, proving that you're performing your life correctly by using sex as a scorecard. Notice that sex isn't remotely cool when the swingers or the nerds or the band kids pull it off? Some people are calling the shots based on personality and looks, but there's another part where it's not cool because it wasn't achieved by playing the game that sex is meant to keep score of. You weren't tough, you weren't cool, you didn't handle yourself in the right way, you didn't go to the right places or do the right things. It's meant to be a reward for doing the right things, a validation of worth, a story you can brag about, and it has vanishingly little to do with the other person except maybe how good they were to look at. This is a pretty deeply rooted mainstream problem, and if you look for it, you’ll find it in a lot of different places.

I’m going to make a bold statement: I know people who have had sex on a scale that qualifies as modern history. They also fail the ‘cultural coolness’ test with flying colors. Turns out that someone inviting, fun and unpretentious is more personable than the intimidating 2 cool 4 anything archetype, even though certain internet standards are more likely to punish you for being the former than the latter.

fin

I feel like these things are taking root in very-online young people who are getting into their heads about how far removed from society they are because of who/how they are. This is the incel pipeline, it’s a part of what starts to prey on people’s mental health and drives them deeper into isolation, it’s just that these people aren’t in the incel demographic.

This is happening every day in certain online circles, and it's really unsettling to watch how young it goes, even though I do know that some version of it has been around for ages. Peer to peer bullying over attractiveness/lovability isn't new, but seeing a surge of people going after each other for being Bitchess and single in a world that openly considers incels to be a terrorist threat is bizarre. Really gotta emphasize we're drinking the sewer water here.

[enneamage]

The whole Colleen Ballinger thing is a good example of how celebrity ‘cancelation’ can feed into standard setting and community building online. Since she pulled such a cartoonish stunt, she got everyone’s attention and then sunk below most peoples standards. Now there are conversations everywhere about power dynamics and online safety, picking apart what happened and why it was wrong, re-enforcing YouTube CC morality in a very rare ‘most of us agree’ moment.

Notice the way people feel kind of bonded in being able to riff on something unambiguously terrible. It helps that the situation ended ridiculously and in a very clown-able way so most people can join in without much back and forth, but It’s a show of progress that the stack of online creator scandals over the years has managed to add up to a level of public awareness rather than constantly getting brushed aside. Waves that shape peoples behavior are rare and ad companies are always trying to buy them, so the fact that they happen organically on this scale is interesting to watch from a sociology angle.  

[enneamage]

Your incel piece was really well put together I am here to ask you to write on the gender part/whatever you were going to put that you think is worth for a part two. The whole no bitches and simp stuff has always really irked me it's nice to see people spotting that we haven't really changed we're just pushing different words around

They’re not even different words as well, it’s just the same words with a pretense of irony OTL. Oh to be young again and not obsessively concerned with big-picture cause and effect, theory brain has ruined me.

The thing is I had to stop before I went into gender because if I went there I would never come out, it’s a massive topic and it’s really hard to do it justice in a short form. A simplified version of what I might pick on is the way that the trivial non-human ‘love interest’ nickname tends to be feminine, even if the joke has become gender neutral, and on a certain level we all know why that is, or at least that it “seems to feel right.” Getting bitches tends to be a masc-coded activity and there’s a lot of dignity in the proactive implications of being able to attract someone by doing coolness as we’ve already touched on.

On one hand it’s callous and objectifying, on the other it reduces vulnerability and signals social status, it’s like a thread of Toxic Masculinity run wild in the weirdest little nerd communities it could latch onto. People of every gender latch onto it because they… want to be people, they can intuitively tell that “getting bitches” is the more dignified thing to do (rather than being a bitch waiting to be got) so they take the concept for themselves, as well as the ideals attached to it. It’s a bit sad to watch.

[enneamage]

Why Tommy being bisexual would(n’t) matter.

Main gets hype when Tommy has a gay moment™️. While this is largely in-group teasing, ‘It’s a joke’ ranks up there with ‘it’s platonic’ and ‘I’m not sexualising’ in terms of Main-typical repression—most people might truly be noncommittal, but others might be showing their hand a bit. I’m making a gut call and saying that the topic comes up with enough frequency and eagerness that there’s an interesting dynamic going on.

People have been nosing into each other’s love lives from the beginning of time. Romance and attachment are big human interest stories and most people have an ear for them in some form or another. The question of human sexuality is interesting because it carries a lot with it that doesn’t have much to do with the immediate act itself—a lot of people rightfully wonder why it would matter who wants to get with what gender and why, and the answer is less the immediate impulse as much as the domino effect it has on the rest of their lives, and the lives of the people around them. This post isn’t actually about if Tommy is a boyliker or not, it’s about why there’s so much urgency around divining if he is a boyliker, and what that means.

Ships

The first and simplest answer is that people want to believe that their ‘ships of choice’ are possible—that the dynamics that they love the most between the people that they like could get romantically sanctified. This motivation is common and low-stakes, people want to believe that the thing they see (or think they see) exists in the world. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be a transformative fandom (attachment through fic and art) investment, people often look at celebrities and speculate who is and isn’t good for who behind closed doors regardless.

People like having reminders around them that love is real, particularly the versions of love that appeal to them. (We’re going to loop back around to this in a slightly deeper capacity later.)

Identity

If I were to pick a contemporary figure that was a perfect example of being tormented by the crossroads between personal identity, romantic attraction, social scripts and gender identity, I would choose Tommy. That was actually a big part of my first impression of him, he had the demons of an online gamer upbringing with the piss and vinegar of a small dog.  

Straight young men are asked to do several things at once, most non-explicitly. They’re put in situations where they’re pressured to rid themselves of femininity to the best of their ability to reduce vulnerability (both emotional and to criticism by others who target those traits.) This naturally puts them in an adversarial, fearful and devaluing relationship towards femininity, and sometimes women themselves. At the same time, all of this is done with the approximate goal of gaining female attention, using the romantic/sexual approval of women as the ultimate measurement of achievement. Not only is this confusing, it’s a paradox, and I could see it drive Tommy a bit crazy. He was not just a straight boy but a straightened boy, literally performing straightness, and it made him sound like he might commit some sort of crime. There’s not much uncommon about his story when you boil it down save for the scale of it, so in a way it’s not even personal, he just happens to have been a perfect caricature of it. 

Heterofatalism

Heterofatalism and the dynamics of modern relationships are some of my favorite topics, by which I mean they’re my ol’ faithful when I need to get into a despair spiral. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a relationship statistic that made me go ‘yeah that seems okay’, and the profound failures of something so basic to produce a non-depressing result are kind of hypnotic. Being worried about ~human nature~ is kind of pretentious but it does make you wonder if these things are nature or nurture problems, and if anything can be done to counteract them.

There’s a lot of unspoken dread and fear surrounding the archetype of the straight boy. He’s selfishly horny, he’s manipulative in a stupid way, he isn’t sure how to love. He’s incapable of taking your perspective or interests into consideration because gendered socialisation has left an unbridgeable gap in his intuition that you either need to fill in yourself time and time again or suffer in silence. While there are plenty of people who exist outside of this mold, finding someone completely free of these traits is an ambition, and the source of a lot of angst.

Male-dominated online video spaces take all these things and pour acid on them. It’s not a mystery why viewers are notoriously paranoid and obsessive with safety-testing CC’s, the stories that come out of the space are nightmarish. While gaming still carries some unwarranted stigma, it is a sphere that collects an identifiable subsection of people that lean a bit stilted and shut-down, which doesn’t compound well with the above problem.

I think people are pessimistic about Tommy’s ability to connect with women. People don’t talk about this directly because they may not even realise they think it, It’s too brutal of an accusation to admit that they don’t think he would be able to treat a woman well in spite of how much they like him. Still, their instincts are based off hours of exposure to his content where being a Clueless Straight was his primary shtick, as well as the loud undercurrent of truth in comedy. While it’s true that casual viewers wouldn’t have many insights into his personal life by his own design, most people will be left with the ghost of the impression thatTommy is a, if not the, Clueless Straight. They’ve been given nothing but forms of evidence to suggest it, even if it was cartoony and (hopefully) larger than life.

When it comes to his early career, the words “homicidally misogynistic” would not have been out of place. Badly out of context, but not unwarranted. I don’t really hold that era against him, because it’s obvious that he was acting out in ignorance that was quickly pressed out of him by Wilbur, but the archetypal disappointing straight boy is ignorant; someone complacent, set in their own agenda, and unwilling to learn beyond immediate self-serving motivations. Tommy has greatly improved, but people seem to throw up a silent prayer for him to be into men so that he can be fully delivered from this dynamic, bypassing it altogether instead of being tasked with learning his way out of it. This is both because the idea of a woman having to tutor him out of it themselves is depressing and too-real, damaging the escapist element of his vibe, as well as people being quietly doubtful that it’s even fully possible. Exclusively same-gender attracted teens didn’t have to resolve straight dynamics, their journey was declaring independence from them, so it makes sense that some see them as things best left behind. 

Again, nobody wants to think of him this way, so they find ways to think and hope around it. They try to see the best in him and separate him from the toxicity in Straight Culture, simultaneously dragging him out of a burning building and diffusing him like an active bomb.

Online dynamics and LGBTQ+ identity

The teens are gay online, and it matters to them. People may be isolated and seeking out people who are like them, trying to cultivate spaces and distinct cultural identity. Because the internet runs on keywords and personal data, online spaces directly and indirectly turn peoples attention inwards and ask them ‘who are you and what is it about you that qualifies you to show up/speak in this space.’  Among the simpler answers (I’m a fan, I’m a cooking enthusiast, I have a deep knowledge of stamps) you have people who have/go on to cultivate a queer identity and stand proudly by it alongside their peers.

When standing outside of a mainstream norm, having an in-group is valuable. You also get to define what you’re not, giving you the opportunity to formally disown the parts of society that never gelled with you to begin with; there has to be a reason why you don’t click with these NPC acting ass people. Why are there so many of them, and so few of you, but the distinction can be felt so strongly? Maybe it is LGBT+ identity, maybe it’s something else, but there’s got to be some trait that can be pointed to that’s making the difference. 

Because LGBT+ identity isn’t a cultural default, there’s a much greater cultural association of self-actualisation and self-discovery with it. There’s a narrative of working through things, resolving things, and coming to peace with things associated with integrating it into one’s sense of self. Someone’s concept of their self-interest changes when the concept of their self changes, which means that they might not even have to become more empathic to change their thoughts and behavior, they just need to be re-directed.  

People want to feel like they have common ground with Tommy, to claim him as one of their own while also finding him to be safe for them. It wouldn’t be enough to be an ally because it still carries a feeling of otherness, and being ‘an ally’ would require a level of perspective-taking that people are very sceptical of right now—if someone doesn’t have firsthand knowledge of something their ability to understand it, let alone interact with it, is under moral question. (This is a problematic line of thinking, but we’re not tackling that one today.) Even people within the LGBTQ+ umbrella get chastised for being out of bounds or spreading irresponsible PR, the allies can stay all the way out of it.

There’s an article that I love and I hand it out like candy because 1) my pseudoacademic ass thinks its hilarious and 2) it outlines the difference, real or perceived, between mainstream straight relationship culture and queer culture. Is it really a utopia free of all polarity? No, a lot of similar problems show up in different forms and are even compounded by unique factors, but there’s a feeling of hope among the youth in the idea that you can get away from this miserable hamster wheel by turning to people you feel less estranged from.

The unspoken strategy

People don’t want to not like Tommy. There are a few mind-tricks that people do to avoid not liking Tommy—they put emphasis on his youth to take the heat off him being a dumbass, they handle him with a feminine sensibility despite him being a cis boy, and so on. This fits that pattern: People cross their fingers and hope he’ll get over this ‘girls’ phase to settle down with someone that he’s capable of being his better self with.

It’s unspoken—some people do not expect Tommy to be ‘one of the good ones.’ Technically it was never his responsibility to manage his image in this way, but the reaction among a vocal minority is the same, and people pretty uniformly tense up when he talks about Women. He knows he’s playing with cringe humor, but I don’t think he knows the depth of the button he’s pushing, or why sexuality ‘truthing’ is egged on by his play-ineptitude. He is someone who called to mind a kind of cultural scar that people might not have even gotten from him, but he does aggravate, which is why they want him to be provably different.

While I’m using Tommy as an example here, this is actually a pattern that I’ve noticed among a surprising number of CC’s in one form or another. A lot of hope is put behind the idea that a kind of spiritual knot will be untangled once they figure out that they’re bisexual (Read: ‘recognise’ that they connect better with men than they ever will with women) and implicitly never interact romantically with a woman again. It’s an easy thought experiment to take the people commonly speculated to be bisexual and see how the feel of them changes if one tries to think of them as exclusively straight. If it feels uncomfortable, like some sort of appeal has died off or even seems like a dealbreaker, there are probably stakes behind it beyond incidental sexuality. This isn’t necessarily bad on the part of the observer, but it’s an interesting chance to pick apart where the repulsion is coming from.

This pattern shows up with a number of other CCs-- People hope that whatever strain of Male Manipulator Wilbur has will be less toxic to another man, and people like to re-frame George as a Trophy Wife to distract from the very real possibility of a Lazy Gamer Husband. On the other end of the spectrum, Phil is a good example of someone who pulls an audience in the same sphere but gets different results. Since people will always speculate there’s no saying that no-one suspects anything of him, but there’s less hopeful urgency surrounding him since he’s got a place as the positive wifeguy representation.

This dynamic is a bit elaborate, and isn’t the only reason people speculate on the sexuality of CCs. Most people are following the tried and true “I saw gay, I said gay” model, which still sits at the core of most speculation. This is just one of the more obscure possible answers to the question “what does it matter to you if he’s gay/bi or not?”

Bringing the topic back around to Tommy, he has already changed for the better over the years, and with any luck he’ll keep moving in a positive direction. Will he ever abandon his Clueless Straight shtick altogether? It feels more likely that we’re going to get an evolved version of it over time, but you never know. As for the topic of sexuality, it’s a wildcard, I genuinely have no guesses as to what label he’ll prefer to go by years from now, but I do tend to be satisfied with what he says about himself in public when he says it.